The music has stopped for western Victoria’s Pitch Festival. The large electronic music festival pulled the plug on Sunday afternoon after the Country Fire Authority (CFA) declared extreme fire danger for today. Festival attendees, industry observers and many in the local community question why the event went ahead in the first place.
This weekend’s shambles poses important questions about the social license to operate cultural events of this nature. As the world warms and our weather intensifies, large outdoor festivals are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. Australia’s music sector needs to begin an urgent conversation about the sustainability of these events, particularly when they’re held in sensitive locations or at risky times of the year.
The long weekend this year has been hit by a sweltering heatwave. It was 38 degrees for much of Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and the festival site was dry and dusty. By late Sunday afternoon, a fatality had been confirmed, Antony Maugeri, 23, of Niddrie, an aspiring DJ, with two more attendees taken to hospital. The Victorian Coroner is expected to hold an inquest.
It was clear from as early as Wednesday that the festival weekend would face significant fire risk. The region is tinder dry: there has been no meaningful rain since the devastating fire that burned through the neighbouring township of Pomonal in January. More than 300 firefighters are still working to watch and contain the remnants of the huge blaze that burned through Mount Buangorand threatened Beaufort.
By mid-week, with the weather forecast for a heatwave, locals were openly questioning the wisdom of continuing with the event. But the incentives to hold on and hope for the best appear to have overwhelmed common sense. Cancelling a big music festival a few days out all but guarantees huge financial losses for promoters. Many costs are sunk, including site production and booking deposits for big acts, while refunding tickets means event revenue drops to zero. Importantly, event insurance policies may require a forced cancellation by authorities for a pay-out. The result of that bad decision-making is manifest this morning.
With the news that the festival had finally been cancelled, I headed out to the festival site on Sunday afternoon to ask some questions. When I drove up to the gates, I encountered the aggressive attention of Pitch Festival security, who accused me of trespassing (I was at the front gate, asking to speak to the media liaison).
I ran into our local locksmith, who had been working all day in the hot sun to help attendees who had locked their keys in their cars. He was pretty over it: unable to find some of his prospective clients in the sea of cars in the sprawling paddock.
In front of the empty ticket booth were a number of huddled groups of disappointed festival-goers, waiting for friends to arrive to pick them up. One young woman was in tears. Despite the cancellation announcement, buses were not running, and the attendees I spoke to told me they were told that they wouldn’t be arriving until the next morning. However, at this stage, security apprehended me and physically escorted me back to my car.
On the dusty road back towards Moyston were many stopped cars. One group of festival goers was helping a carload with a punctured tyre — three young men named Tim, Ben and Cooper. They were happy to speak about their experience.
“Disappointing,” said Tim. “Lacklustre,” added Cooper. “Lack of communication”, Ben said.
“We found out that the festival was finishing today all from randoms walking about, just some guy randomly walking past,” Tim said. He explained that the lack of mobile phone access on the site meant festival-goers couldn’t read Instagram updates.
“As I started the walk over to where the signage was, I talked to the cops that were there, and they didn’t know what was going on, so the police hadn’t even been told.”
“I think they’d committed to too much expenditure, and they didn’t want to cancel.”
A large SUV drove past, giving us a beep. “Get home safe guys!”
Ben was critical of the mixed messages coming from organisers. “The signage said if you choose to leave, that’s a CFA recommendation, but that’s your choice, so people thought they wouldn’t get a refund.”
For Cooper, the issue was a “lack of organisation.”
“Some sort of looking ahead,” he told me, “if you know it’s going to be 40 degrees, perhaps you might have put up some more shade.”
“The silver lining is we’re going home.”
Not everyone got to go home. I drove back to Ararat, where I met a young couple on the main street with their tent in a trolley. They had managed to catch a taxi down to the town from the festival site, but now there was no train until morning. All the motels were booked out. They wanted to know the safest place to pitch their tent for the night — perhaps the garden of the RSL, they thought.
With one member of their audience dead, two more in hospital and others camping out in the gardens of the local town, it’s not surprising that scrutiny is now falling on Pitch Festival organisers, the modishly named Untitled Group. Some also question the messaging by the Country Fire Authority, which advised of the elevated risk but did not mandate an event cancellation.
Pitch has grown rapidly in recent years, from a boutique electronic event for a few thousand in the years before the pandemic to a full-scale 18,000-person event this year. Even last year, there had been signs that the upscaling was challenging local infrastructure, with the 4G network at Halls Gap overwhelmed. Leaving aside the risk of fire, the health and emergency services footprint of an event with the possibility of significant drug overdoses or mass heatstroke events was always likely to overstretch local ambulance and hospital capacities.
Transport infrastructure was particularly challenged. There is only a single-lane dirt track in and out of the festival site, which eventually joins a winding country road south of Moyston. As I slowly drove in the gate on Sunday, I was passed by an ambulance, lights flashing, weaving in and out of the P-plated campervans, with the dust reducing visibility to just metres.
Electronic music promoters are not famous for their civic-mindedness, but Untitled Group have disabused few stereotypes with their confused messaging and chaotic decision-making. They appear to have failed at even the simplest aspects of event communication, such as putting a time and date on their messages. Their statement about the death of a festival attendee was particularly tone-deaf, written in a kind of PR-style Instagram-speak that conveyed little empathy and less humanity.
This weekend’s chaos should not be acceptable. Music festivals are important regional tourism drawcards. But at a minimum, festivals need to be organised properly and run safely, not least because the large numbers of punters they bring in are generally young and vulnerable.
Crikey put a number of questions to Pitch festival organisers, including why wasn’t the festival cancelled earlier, and why were communications to festival-goers so confused. Perhaps understandably, we did not hear back before deadline.
Anyone who has ever been to a “big day out” would never go to any concert in the hotter months ever again. The heat totally detracts from the enjoyment of the event. Pity the people at Womad.
My one and only was ’94; generally avoid festivals and big events that have suboptimal everything especially pricing…..
did anyone mention the toilets,
suboptimal festival toilets, now there’s a euphemism is ever there was one
and the putrid hellish smell wafting across the grounds
when mid afternoon the pumper trucks arrive
to remove the bowel contents of thousands of large intestines…
My friend who runs a very successful festival has priorities as 1. Toilets, 2. Acts. Nuff said.
And it’s in the cooler months with a cap on attendance. Tickets sell out in 15 minutes.
No phone reception, no internet, no power. Total disconnect.
Sounds like Pitch was a mess, but this weekend I was at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, which is superbly run and went without a hitch despite the extreme heat of Saturday. And I’ll bet there were a lot more people at Port Fairy than at Pitch.
It depends where they’re held and how well they’re organised.
Extreme heat has been a risk for summer festivals and community events for decades now.
I query the sense of having outdoor dog-judging shows in the middle of the day at suburban festivals or even Mardi Gras Fair Day when there is no shade, insufficient water and -one year- dogs requiring emergency attention with hoses up their bum due to heat stroke.
This is an odd article.
To posit this article on the premise
that festivals face an existential threat from fire danger
is quite simply preposterous.
Its not as if festivals cannot be held in autumn, late spring or early summer
OUTSIDE the periods of peak fire danger.
But we are already having a warmer autumn than usual.
When sport also starts to take this as seriously as it needs (the insurance companies will come for them as well) , there will be a huge crush on mid year dates for events of all kinds.
These festivals often use headline overseas acts to boost ticket sales. Overseas acts are performing at the venues in the Northern Hemisphere for their summer…. Glastonbury for instance, they won’t be down here for our winter. This is why we have these hot summer festivals.
Glastonbury attendees more often than not find themselves knee deep in mud